African languages and literature

Funeral inscription for King Massinissa, at Dougga , dated 138 BC. (Now in the Bardo Museum in Tunis). The inscription’s in two African languages: Punic (Phoenician) and Berber.

Because Africa is such a big place, people who lived in different parts of Africa spoke different languages. There are hundreds of different African languages. In North Africa and Egypt, people spoke languages related to Arabic and Hebrew, called Egyptian and Berber. Under Roman rule, some people also spoke Latin or Greek. Then when North Africa was conquered by the Arabs, many people there began to speak Arabic (although others continued to speak Berber).

In West Africa, people spoke languages related to Bantu (BAN-too), like Yoruba. This language gradually spread across Africa, east and south, so that now people in many parts of Africa speak languages related to Bantu. Probably before this, most people in the southern half of Africa spoke languages like the !Kung language. Nobody knows whether Bantu-speaking people moved all over the place, or just new people began to speak the Bantu language.

Girls singing in Fulani, a West African language

In East Africa, people spoke a Bantu language called Swahili (swah-HEE-lee), which had so many Arabic words in it that it was almost a mixed language, a creole.

And in South Africa, people spoke languages which used a lot of clicking sounds and are often called click languages, which sound different and are not closely related to any other known languages. One of these languages is !Kung. These may be like the earliest human languages. They are different because the people who lived in South Africa were isolated, and didn’t speak to outsiders very often.

Around 500 AD, when Bantu-speaking people moved into South Africa, they began to mix a lot of local !Kung words into their own language, and that created new languages called Xhosa and Zulu.

Queen Amanitore of Sudan (1-25 AD) with both Egyptian and Meroitic hieroglyphs.

The people who spoke these languages all made up stories and told them to their children, like the Anansi stories that some Bantu speakers told.

Beginning about 3000 BC, some African people also began to use writing to record their stories. In Egypt, people began to use hieroglyphs. They wrote stories, official inscriptions, and prayers. South of Egypt, in Aksum (modern Sudan), people also began to write using their own kind of hieroglyphs.

In the rest of North Africa, people began to write about 800 BC, when Phoenician invaders brought the alphabet with them. We don’t have any long stories from ancient Carthage, but we do have inscriptions and tombstones. In Meroe and Aksum, as well, people began using a variation of the West Asian alphabet known as the Ge’ez script around the 400s BC.

When the Romans conquered North Africa in the 100s BC, people there slowly began to write in Greek and Latin instead of in Phoenician. Some famous African writers from this time are Tertullian, Perpetua, Cyprian, and Augustine (who were all Christians).

Advertisement

Tags

About

Since 1994, Quatr.us Study Guides has offered free history and science articles to keep you connected to the latest discoveries in world history. We want you to know why things happened, how that matters today, and what you can do about it. Experts write all our 2500 articles (and counting!), with full bibliography and citation information. Coming soon: free lesson plans and a first-rate resource area.

Why are we called Quatr.us?

Good question! We were thinking of the four corners of the world - four Quarters. We were thinking of Questions, and Quick, and Quality. We wanted a name that would be ours and nobody else's.

Get in touch!

We’d love to talk! Reach out on twitter (@Quatr_us) or Instagram (@quatr.us) or by email (karen @ quatr.us). Open to your sponsorships, link exchanges, or just friendly talk about history. I’d be up for guest posts on your blog, joint Twitter threads, lesson plans, book reviews, or what-have-you. Send all your ideas!